Mashable has an interesting article about why Twitter persists despite frequent performance issues: “Less is more. Simplicity is power.” By providing little more than an API, upon which numerous others have built tools, it doesn’t so directly compete with other services. I wonder if perhaps this is the right approach for a learning system? One…
My cameras (yeah, two of the three) have lots of pictures. Expect some this weekend. Hopefully they will be paced to last the week rather than an insane dump all at once. Watch my Flickr. Yet again, I failed to blog at BbWorld. Probably I would had wifi been available in the sessions. Instead, I…
I just noticed an item in Behind the Blackboard for “Direct Help”. This seems to be a way Blackboard is attempting to help students and parents find assistance by directing them to institutions. I probably missed the propaganda about this initiative. Though I do understand the problem and why it ought to be solved. People…
The worst response technical support can give me is to suggest I try something I have already tried without success. An explanation why this suggestion is going to work this time when the previous attempt(s) did not work would help. Otherwise, why would I expect it to work this time when it didn’t last time?…
Image via Wikipedia Apparently the official launch of Firefox 3 is tomorrow. So we get to look forward to 4+ months of students and faculty members asking why Blackboard Vista doesn’t recognize Fx 3 as supported. Every week’s call with Blackboard will have the conversation: Us: Is it supported yet? Bb: Not yet. We are…
I just read: Clients are receiving responses to and closures of long-outstanding tickets. In the past quarter we’ve reduced the number of outstanding tickets by 15% (1500 tickets). We closed several tickets because it was decided no resolution was ever going to be provided after the ticket was open for 6 months without the tier…
Blackboard implemented a ranking system to determine the priority of support tickets. This effort uses criteria like the age and recency of updates to ensure the attention of Technical Support Managers. Certainly this initiative is due to continuing customer complaints about languishing tickets. Last spring we saw a similar push to fix support. We have…
Be more secure! Upgrade today. Want better functionality? Upgrade today. Save a developer! Upgrade today. The save a developer thing is the impetus for this post. The upgrade today mantra annoys me. Software rarely spends enough time in alpha and beta cycles to to identify all the issues. People have been so burned by using…